Category Archives: North America

Episode 404: The Kraken and Chessie

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Thanks to Ezra and Leo for suggesting these two sea monsters this week! Happy Halloween!

Further reading:

Legend of Chessie alive, well in Maryland

Here be sea monsters: We have met Chessie and…is it us?

Not actually a kraken, probably:

Not actually Chessie but an atmospheric photo of a toy brontosaurus:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Just a few days remain in October, so this is our Halloween episode and the end of monster month for another year! We had so many great suggestions for Halloween episodes that I couldn’t get to them all, but I might just sprinkle some in throughout the other months too. We have two great monsters to talk about this week, suggested by Ezra and Leo, the kraken and Chessie the sea serpent.

First, as always on our Halloween episode, we have a few housekeeping details. If anyone wants a sticker, feel free to email me and I’ll send you one, or more than one if you like. That offer is good all the time, not just now. I don’t have any new stickers printed but I do have lots of the little ones with the logo and the little ones with the capybara.

I also don’t have any new books out this year, but you can still buy the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book if you like. I am actually working on another book about mystery animals, tentatively titled Small Mysteries since it’s going to be all about mysteries surrounding small animals like frogs and invertebrates that often get overlooked. I’m hoping to have it ready to publish in early 2026 or so. I don’t know that I’ll do another Kickstarter for it since that was a lot of work, and I just finished a Kickstarter for more enamel pins and just can’t even think about the stress of doing another crowdfunding campaign anytime soon. Also, I hate to keep asking listeners for money.

Anyway, one of the things I don’t like about Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie is that I didn’t cite my sources properly, so for the Small Mysteries book I’m being very careful to have footnotes on pretty much every page so that anyone who wants to double-check my information can do so easily.

But all that is in the future. Let’s celebrate Halloween now with a couple of sea monsters!

We’ll start with Ezra’s suggestion, the kraken. It’s a creature of folklore that has gotten confused with lots of other folklore monsters. We don’t know how old the original legend is, but the first mention of it in writing dates to 1700, when an Italian writer published a book about his travels to Scandinavia. One of the things he mentions is a giant fish with lots of horns and arms, which he called the “sciu-crak.” This seems to come from the Norwegian word meaning sea krake.

“Krake” is related to the English word crooked, and it can refer to an old dead tree with crooked branches, or tree roots, or something with a hook on the end like a boat hook, or an anchor or drag, or various similar things related to hooks or multiple prongs. That has led to people naturally assuming that the kraken had many arms and was probably a giant squid, and that may be the case. But there’s another possibility, because in many old uses of the word krake, it means something weak or misshapen, like a rotten old dead tree. In the olden days in Norway, people thought that if you spoke about an animal by name, the spirit that protected that animal would hear you. Some historians think that whale-hunters referred to whales as krake so the whale’s protective spirit wouldn’t guess that they were planning a whale-hunt. Who would refer to a huge, strong animal like a whale as weak and crooked, after all?

Whatever its origins, the kraken’s modern form is mainly due to a Danish bishop called Erik Pontoppidan. He wrote about the kraken in 1753, and embellished the story by saying the kraken could reach out of the ocean with its long arms to grab sailors or just pull an entire ship down into the water and sink it. He also said the kraken was so big that when it rested at the water’s surface, sailors would mistake it for an island. This is a common story in many cultures, always referring to whales. Pontoppidan suggested the kraken might be a giant octopus, but also thought it might be a giant starfish or even a giant crab. He seemed to think the word kraken should be krabben, and I swear I didn’t make that up.

Either way, the kraken is a monster of folklore, not a real animal. That’s a relief! Now you don’t have anything to worry about in the ocean at all, right?

Next, let’s learn about another water monster, Chessie, suggested by Leo. Leo also suggested we talk about Chesapeake Bay in general.

Chesapeake Bay is located on the east coast of North America, specifically where the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware meet. On the map it looks sort of like a huge crack in the land, but while rivers and streams empty into it like they would a gigantic lake, it’s connected to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s about 200 miles long, or 320 km, and up to 30 miles wide, or 48 km.

It formed about 35 million years ago when a small meteor struck the area. During the Pleistocene, AKA the ice ages, the Susquehanna River flowed through the crater and into the sea. Around 10,000 years ago, ocean levels rose due to melting glaciers, and flooded the river valley that had started out as an impact crater. Now it’s a bay.

Chesapeake Bay isn’t technically a lake, but it’s also not really part of the ocean. Part of the bay is freshwater from the rivers that flow into it, while at the end that connects to the Atlantic Ocean, it’s salty. In between it’s brackish water that’s kind of salty but not nearly as salty as the ocean. It’s home to hundreds of animals, with many more visiting the bay during migration. Sometimes whales are even spotted in the bay.

We could literally talk about the animals and the history of Chesapeake Bay all day and not run out of topics, so I have plans to revisit some of the animals in future episodes. Today we mainly want to focus on the sea monster known as Chessie.

As you may have already guessed, the name Chessie isn’t just short for Chesapeake, it also echoes the name Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. The first Nessie sighting was in 1933, leading to a lake monster craze in Scotland and many other parts of the world. Suddenly people were seeing monsters everywhere, such as Champ from Lake Champlain, which we talked about in episode 29 along with Nessie.

No one’s sure when the first Chessie sighting happened. Some people say it was as early as 1936, while others claim it wasn’t until 1980. In 1943 two fishermen reported seeing a strange creature in the water about 75 yards from their boat, or 68 meters. At first they thought there was something black floating in the water, with the visible part of it about 12 feet long, or 3 ½ meters. Then they realized it was alive. Its head was shaped like a horse’s but was only about the size of an American football. It’s not clear if it raised its head completely out of the water like a sea serpent in a cartoon, but the men did say that it turned its head almost all the way around several times.

There are also reports from 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1997, and 2014. In 1978 a retired CIA officer saw what looked like a 15-foot, or 4 ½ meter, snake swimming in the water. In 1982 a man named Bob Frew took some grainy videocamera footage of something that he described as “a telephone pole that swims.” The video shows a brown object swimming like a marine snake, with a side to side motion.

In the 1980s people in the state of Maryland tried to get Chessie listed as a protected species. It didn’t work, but it did bring attention to the state of the Chesapeake Bay. The bay was increasingly polluted by industrial and agricultural waste that was allowed to enter the bay untreated, leading to algal blooms that deoxygenated the water and killed everything around them. The once-famous oyster reefs in the bay started to be overharvested too, and since oysters are natural water filters, their absence has caused an extra decrease in water quality. With Chessie acting as a mascot for water quality and ecology, people paid more attention to what was happening to the bay.

Chessie the monster doesn’t have a lot of sightings, and most likely they’re all misidentifications of ordinary animals or items, like whales or floating logs. There are some amazing creatures that live in or visit the bay, including a fish called the sturgeon that can grow up to 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters, bull sharks that can grow up to 13 feet long, or 4 meters, bottlenose dolphins, sea turtles, even manta rays. Most people agree that Chessie probably isn’t an actual sea serpent.

But there is another Chessie that’s definitely real, although you can’t actually call him a monster. A Florida manatee was spotted in the summer of 1994 swimming around in the bay and exploring some of the river mouths. Since Chesapeake Bay is nice and warm in summer, the manatee was fine at first. But by October he was still there, and the water was getting too cold for a manatee to tolerate.

Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources worked with the Coast Guard and a lot of volunteers to find the manatee, capture him safely, and get him back to Florida. He was given a clean bill of health by veterinarians and was tagged and released.

The following summer, he swam back to Chesapeake Bay. But who can blame him? It’s a beautiful place!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 402: The Hoop Snake and Friends

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Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC this week as we learn about some scary-sounding reptiles, including the hoop snake!

Further reading:

The Story of How the Giant “Terror Skink” Was Presumed Extinct, Then Rediscovered

San Diego’s Rattlesnakes and What To Do When They’re on Your Property

Snake that cartwheels away from predators described for the first time

Giant new snake species identified in the Amazon

The terror skink, AKA Bocourt’s terrific skink [photo by DECOURT Théo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116258516]:

The hoop snake according to folklore:

The sidewinder rattlesnake [photo taken from this article]:

The dwarf reed snake [photo by Evan Quah, from page linked above]:

The green anaconda [photo by MKAMPIS – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62039578]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

As monster month continues, we’re going to look at some weird and kind of scary, or at least scary-sounding, snakes and lizards. Thanks to Nora and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week!

We’ll start with the terror skink, whose name should inspire terror, but it’s also called Bocourt’s terrific skink, which is a name that should inspire joy. Which is it, terror or joy? I suppose it depends on your mood and how you feel about lizards in general. All skinks are lizards but not all lizards are skinks, by the way.

The terror or possibly terrific skink lives on two tiny islets, which are miniature islands. These islets are themselves off the coast of an island called the Isle of Pines, but in French, which I cannot pronounce. The Isle of Pines is only 8 miles wide and 9 miles long, or 13 by 15 km, and is itself off the coast of the bigger island of New Caledonia. All these islands lie east of Australia. Technically the islets where the skink lives are off the coast of another islet that is itself off the coast of the Isle of Pines, which is off the coast of New Caledonia, but where exactly it lives is kept a secret by the scientists studying it.

The skink was described in 1876 but only known from a single specimen captured on New Caledonia around 1870, and after that it wasn’t seen again and was presumed extinct. Colonists and explorers brought rats and other invasive animals to the New Caledonian islands, which together with habitat loss have caused many other native species to go extinct.

But in December 2003, a scientific expedition studying sea snakes around the New Caledonian islands caught a big lizard no one recognized. Once the expedition members realized it was a terror skink, alive and well, they took lots of pictures and videos of it and then released it back into the wild. Since then, more specimens have been discovered during four different expeditions, but only on the islets, not on any of the bigger islands. It’s so critically endangered that its location has to be kept secret, because if someone captures some of the lizards to sell on the illegal pet market, the species could easily be driven to extinction.

The terror skink is gray-brown with darker stripes, a long tail, and a slightly downturned mouth that makes it look grumpy. It grows about 20 inches long, or 50 cm, including its tail. This is really big for a skink, so technically it’s a giant skink.

It gets the name terror skink from its size and from its teeth, which are large and curved like fangs. It mainly eats one particular species of land crab, which is why its jaws are so strong and its teeth are so sharp, so it can bite through the crab’s exoskeleton.

Another lizard with a spooky name that has been presumed extinct is the gray ghost lizard, suggested by Richard from NC. It’s more properly called the giant Tongan ground skink, and it’s native to some more South Pacific islands—specifically, the Tongan Islands. These islands are even farther east from Australia than the New Caledonian islands, and are actually closer to New Zealand than to Australia, although they’re not really very close to either.

The giant Tongan ground skink was described in 1839 from two specimens collected in the late 1820s on Tongatapu Island. They’re the only two specimens known and the lizard is considered extinct, especially considering that these days, the island is almost completed deforested and rats, dogs, and cats have been introduced to it, which has driven many species to extinction.

But after the terror skink was rediscovered, scientists started to wonder if the gray ghost might still be around. It was called the gray ghost because it was so hard to see, since it was dark gray in color. The native Tongan people considered it a good omen if someone saw one, since it was so rare.

A paper published in early 2024 suggests that the gray ghost might be living on some smaller islands where forests still remain, and also suggested that it might be nocturnal and a burrowing skink. That would explain why it was so rarely seen by the people who lived on its island when it was still alive.

We know basically nothing about the gray ghost. Hopefully an expedition to the smaller Tongan islands will rediscover it so we can learn more about it and protect it.

Richard from NC also suggested we talk about the hoop snake, an animal of folklore. I remember reading about it as a kid in a book about American folklore animals, most of which were clearly jokey and not meant to seem real. The hoop snake sounded more realistic.

The hoop snake was supposed to be a long, slender snake that slithered around normally most of the time, but when it needed to move faster, it would grab the end of its tail in its mouth and roll like a wheel, or a hoop. Some versions of the story had the snake rolling along with the tip of its tail pointed forward, and since the tail was supposed to be sharp and venomous, it would roll after you so fast that when its tail stabbed you, you’d drop dead. The only way to escape would be to jump behind a tree. The tail would stab the tree instead and you could run away while the hoop snake was trying to unstick its tail. The venom in its tail was supposed to be so deadly that the tree would turn black and die. Other versions of the story said you had to jump through the snake’s hoop to confuse it, which would allow you to get away safely.

All this is weird, to say the least, but some snakes do have ways of traveling that are unusual. The sidewinder, for instance, is a real species of rattlesnake from the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. It grows around 2 ½ feet long, or 80 cm, and has pointy scales, called keeled scales, including a pair above its eyes that make it look like it has little horns. Since it’s a type of rattlesnake, it has a rattle that it can shake to make a loud warning noise. It’s mostly brown in color, or sometimes pinkish, yellowish, or even whitish, with darker stripes or blotches down its back. Its coloration helps camouflage it against the ground, and it will actually change color slightly depending on the temperature. This is something other rattlesnakes can do too.

The sidewinder lives in desert conditions where it has to travel through loose sand, and the sand is also extremely hot. While the snake can travel normally when it wants to, it sidewinds to move quickly over loose sand or very hot sand that might burn it. It lifts most of its body up so that it’s only touching the ground in two places, then undulates its body so that the sections touching the ground constantly move. That way no part of its body has to stay in contact with hot sand for more than a split second. It travels in a path that runs diagonal to the direction its body is pointing. That sounds complicated, but it’s easy for the snake. It’s not even the only snake that can travel by sidewinding. Other desert-living snakes travel across hot sand by sidewinding, including several species from Africa, but just about any snake can do it if they need to. It allows a snake to travel over surfaces that are too slippery for its belly scales to get a grip.

The story of the hoop snake might be based on garbled reports of sidewinders, but it might just be a completely invented animal. The hoop snake story is found in other parts of the world too, especially Australia, although it dates back to at least the late 18th century in the United States.

No snake in the world has the anatomy to allow it to roll like a hoop without hurting itself. But there is one other snake that does something very similar, called cartwheeling. It’s the dwarf reed snake that lives in Malaysia and other parts of southeast Asia. Reed snakes aren’t very well known to science, so this cartwheeling activity wasn’t documented scientifically until recently, with the study published in 2023. Reed snakes are nocturnal and spend most of the daytime hiding under rocks or logs, or buried in dead leaves or sand, so they’re not seen very often by people. The dwarf reed snake is slender and only grows about 10 inches long, or 25 cm.

Some small snakes can jump short distances by pushing their tails against the ground. The dwarf reed snake does something similar, but more complicated. It pushes off with its tail, with its body curved in a sort of S shape. It lands on its head and rolls over completely, head to tail, and then pushes off the ground again with its tail. It can move extremely fast in this way to get away from predators, but it takes a whole lot of energy. But when it’s moving downhill, with gravity on its side, it can continue to cartwheel longer.

Cartwheeling isn’t something the snake does often, and it’s rare that a human would ever observe it. But just like sidewinding, some scientists think cartwheeling might be a motion that more snakes can do if they really need to. Maybe that’s where the hoop snake legend started.

Let’s finish with a suggestion from Nora, who wanted to learn more about the green anaconda. That’s a scary snake for sure, because it happens to be the biggest snake alive today, and almost the longest, as far as we know.

The green anaconda lives throughout much of South America, although not in Patagonia because like most reptiles, it needs warm weather to function. It’s a beautiful olive green with black blotches, and it’s a big, bulky snake. It spends a lot of time in the water, which helps it stay cool in hot weather and helps support its weight comfortably, and its eyes are near the top of its head so it can watch for prey while it’s mostly submerged.

The anaconda is a member of the boa family and is a constrictor. It’s not venomous, but you really don’t want a hug from a hungry anaconda. Its body is bulky because it’s incredibly strong, and once it starts to contract its muscles, whatever it’s constricting has only minutes left to live. It can kill animals as large as caimans, which are a type of crocodile, tapirs, capybaras, deer, and even jaguars. For the most part, though, an anaconda doesn’t want to bother with prey that could potentially hurt it, so it will stick with smaller animals that are still big enough to make it worth the effort. And yes, it is possible that an anaconda in the wild could kill and eat a human, but there’s no reliable evidence that it’s ever happened.

It’s hard to know exactly how long and how heavy an anaconda can get. There are lots of stories of 30-foot, or 9-meter snakes, but that seems to be a wild exaggeration. Snakes are stretchy, and a healthy live snake doesn’t really want to stretch out straight to be measured. A dead snake is even stretchier than a live snake. A shed snakeskin is the stretchiest of all, and usually has stretched out quite a bit when the snake was shedding. A good estimate is that a big female anaconda can grow about 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh around 250 lbs, or 114 kg. Males are smaller on average, and a wild snake will weigh less than one kept in captivity.

There are definitely larger individual anacondas, especially considering that reptiles continue to grow throughout their lives, but they’re probably not that much longer. This is only a little shorter than the reticulated python, which can definitely grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters.

One important detail about the size of the green anaconda is that the biggest snakes live in the Amazon rainforest–but the Amazon rainforest is really hard for humans to navigate safely and most anacondas killed or kept in captivity lived in other parts of South America. So there might easily be anacondas in the rainforest that are much bigger than the ones scientists have been able to measure so far.

In February of 2024, a journal article was published about a 2022 National Geographic nature documentary and scientific expedition to the Amazon basin to find a rumored population of extra-large anacondas. The expedition was led by hunters from the Waorani people, who consider the snakes sacred, and the hunters and their chief were credited as co-authors of the paper, as they should be since they provided so much information.

The scientists were able to examine several fully grown anacondas and take tiny tissue and blood samples to test later. They were astounded at the size of the snakes they found, including one that measured 20 and a half feet long, or 6.3 meters. The hunters reported seeing snakes that they estimated as over 24 feet long, or 7.5 meters, that might have weighed as much as 500 pounds, or 226 kg.

Beyond mere size, though, is something very interesting, which the scientists learned when they got home and ran genetic tests. The anacondas are actually quite different genetically from other anacondas known to science, that live farther south. They described the snake as a new species, which they refer to as the northern green anaconda, but it has actually resulted in a lot of controversy. Some scientists agree that the northern green anaconda is a separate species, others think it’s only a subspecies of the green anaconda, while others think the genetic differences are minor and separating the northern green anaconda from other anacondas isn’t justified by the evidence.

Obviously scientists need to follow up and learn more about the anacondas, but one thing is clear. There are some really, really big snakes out there in the Amazon.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 399: Bears

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Thanks to Anbo, Murilo, Clay, and Ezra for their suggestions this week! Let’s learn about some bears!

Further reading:

Snack attack: Bears munch on ants and help plants grow

Extinct vegetarian cave bear diet mystery unravelled

Ancient brown bear genomes sheds light on Ice Age losses and survival

The sloth bear has shaggy ears and floppy lips [photo from this site]:

An absolute unit of a Kodiak bear in captivity [photo by S. Taheri – zoo, own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1118252]:

A polar bear:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re revisiting a popular topic, bears! We’ll talk about some bears we’ve never covered before, with suggestions from Anbo, Clay, Ezra, and Murilo. We’ll even discuss a small bear mystery which has mostly been solved by science.

To start us off, Anbo wanted to learn about bears in general. We’ve had bear episodes before, but our last episode all about bears was way back in 2017, in episode 42. Some of our listeners weren’t even born back then, which makes me feel super old.

Bears live throughout much of the world today, but they evolved in North America around 38 million years ago. These ancestral bears were small, about the size of a raccoon, but they were successful. They spread into Asia via the land bridge Beringia, where they were even more successful than in North America, so successful that by around 30 million years ago, descendants of those earliest bear ancestors migrated from Asia back into North America. But it wasn’t until the Pleistocene around 2 ½ million years ago that bears really came into their own.

That’s because bears are megafauna, and megafauna evolved mainly as an adaptation to increasingly cold climates. As the ice ages advanced, a lot of animals grew larger so they could stay warm more easily. Predators also had to grow larger as their prey became larger, since if you want to hunt an animal the size of a bison or woolly rhinoceros, you’d better be pretty big and strong yourself.

Bears mostly weren’t hunting animals that big, though. Modern studies suggest that overall, bears are omnivores, not fully carnivorous. Bears eat a lot of plant material even if you don’t count the panda, which isn’t very closely related to other bears. Even when a bear does eat other animals, they’re not usually very big ones.

Let’s take Murilo’s suggestion as an example, the sloth bear. The sloth bear lives in India and is increasingly vulnerable due to habitat loss and poaching. It’s probably most closely related to the sun bear that we talked about in episode 234, which also lives in parts of South Asia. Both the sun bear and the sloth bear have long black hair and a white or yellowish V-shaped marking on the chest. The sloth bear’s hair is especially long on its neck and shoulders, like a mane, and its ears even have long hair.

The sloth bear stands around 3 feet high at the shoulder at most, or 91 cm, and a big male can be over 6 feet tall, or almost 2 meters, when he stands on his hind legs. This isn’t gigantic for bears in general, but it’s not small either. Scientists think the V-shaped marking on its chest warns tigers to leave the sloth bear alone, and tigers mostly do. If tigers think twice about attacking an animal, you know that animal has to be pretty tough.

The sloth bear has massive claws on big paws. The claws can measure 4 inches long, or 10 cm, although they’re not very sharp. The bear has an especially long muzzle but its teeth aren’t very large. Like most bears, it’s good at climbing trees and can run quite fast, and it swims well too. It even has webbed toes.

With all this in mind, what do you think the sloth bear eats? I’ll give you some more hints. It has loose, kind of flappy lips, especially the lower lip. It doesn’t have any teeth in the front of its upper jaw. It mainly uses its huge claws to dig.

If you guessed that the sloth bear eats ants, termites, and other insects, you are right! It digs into termite and ant nests and uses its long, flexible lips to slurp up as many insects as it can, giving them a quick crunch with its back teeth before swallowing them down.

Insects are actually quite nutritious, and the sloth bear isn’t the only bear that eats them. All bears snack on ants and other insects sometimes. You may have heard that bears love honey and will tear open beehives to get it, and while that’s true, the bear is mainly after the larval bees because they’re so nutritious. The honey is just, you know, dessert.

Next, Clay wanted to learn about the Kodiak bear, which may be the largest bear in the world. It’s a subspecies of brown bear and is sometimes called the Alaskan brown bear since it lives on some Alaskan islands called the Kodiak Archipelago. It’s light brown or rusty-red in color.

The Kodiak bear has been restricted to these islands for at least 10,000 years, since the end of the Pleistocene when the sea levels rose as glaciers melted. It demonstrates island gigantism, which is actually quite unusual. Because islands have limited resources, but are relatively protected from large numbers of predators, small animals are the ones that generally adapt to island life by growing larger. Animals that start off large generally adapt by growing smaller, called island dwarfism. That’s why some islands have been home to dwarf elephants but giant rodents.

In the case of the Kodiak bear, it has a source of protein that helps it grow so incredibly large, salmon. Five species of salmon spawn in the freshwater on the islands, and the bears are able to put on lots of weight to survive the harsh winter by eating as much salmon as they can catch. They also have lots of nutritious plants to eat. They actually prefer some plants to eating salmon, which makes sense when you think about it. A wild animal needs to conserve energy, and it can take a lot of energy to catch fish. It’s a lot easier to eat berries, which can’t swim away.

So how big can a Kodiak bear get? A big male can stand up to 10 feet tall on his hind legs, or 3 meters, and be 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters, when standing on all fours. Bears kept in captivity can grow even larger. That’s much bigger than a grizzly and about the same size as the closely related polar bear, which brings us to Ezra’s suggestion.

Ezra wanted to learn about the polar bear, which lives in the Arctic and areas near the Arctic. It doesn’t live near the Antarctic, or south pole, which means polar bears don’t eat penguins, because penguins live around the Antarctic. The polar bear does eat a whole lot of other animals, though, and is the most carnivorous of all bears. It especially likes eating seals, and will also catch and kill walruses, caribou, and beluga whales. That’s right, the polar bear can actually kill an entire whale. The beluga is fairly small for a whale and relies on breathing holes in the ice, and sometimes when it comes up to breathe, there’s a polar bear waiting for it. Most of the time, though, the polar bear eats much smaller animals.

The polar bear spends a lot of its time on sea ice, and a lot of the time in the sea. It swims incredibly well and spends so much time in the water that some people consider it a marine animal. It’s certainly semi-aquatic. Its kidneys are adapted to filter excess salt out of its blood from seawater, and its small eyes are closer to the top of its head than in other bears. This helps it see above water while swimming.

The polar bear is closely related to the brown bear and will sometimes interbreed with the brown bear where their ranges overlap. The resulting hybrid bear is usually light brown in color. The polar bear is famously white, although its fur becomes yellowish as the year goes on. It sheds its winter coat in the spring and the new hair that grows in is white.

Actually, the polar bear’s fur is transparent, but it looks white because of the way it scatters light. The guard hairs are long and coarse, protecting a shorter, softer undercoat that helps keep the bear warm even on bitterly cold nights. Unlike other bears, the polar bear doesn’t hibernate, except for pregnant females.

There used to be a bear of similar size that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and only went extinct about 24,000 years ago. The cave bear gets its name because so many of its remains have been found in caves. It may have hibernated in caves like some bears do today, or it might have used caves as shelters year-round.

Scientists think the cave bear was most closely related to brown bears and polar bears. The males were much larger than females, and a big male was as big as a Kodiak or polar bear. But this giant bear probably wasn’t too much of a problem for our ancient ancestors and Neandertal relations, because it was almost entirely vegetarian.

Scientists have studied the wear pattern on cave bear teeth and determined that it was eating a whole lot of fruit, especially berries. It probably did eat at least some meat, but it’s likely that most of it came from scavenged carcasses. The cave bear didn’t even have all the teeth that other bears have.

All this talk about huge bears brings us to a mystery. It may even be a mystery you were wondering about yourself. How did bears survive the end of the Pleistocene when so many other megafauna went extinct, from the mammoth and giant ground sloth to the dire wolf and sabertooth cat?

A team of scientists from Denmark and Japan decided to examine the genetics of ancient brown bears, to learn how individuals were related and therefore how bears migrated across the world over time. They extracted genetic material from the remains of bears that lived as much as 60,000 years ago and as recently as 3,800 years ago and compared them to each other and to bears alive today.

Scientists already knew that brown bears used to live in more parts of the world than they do today. The prevailing view was that as the climate warmed after the ice ages, the bears retreated into colder parts of the world where they were more comfortable. But the team learned something surprising from the study, which was published in January of 2024.

Brown bears that lived before the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 11,000 years ago, had much broader genetic diversity than the bears that lived more recently. That means that bears that lived as far south as Japan and Ireland during the Pleistocene didn’t move to colder parts of the world, they died out. Each population that went regionally extinct made the brown bear gene pool that much smaller.

Most likely it was a combination of luck and adaptability that allowed bears to survive the end-Pleistocene extinctions. Just think how sad it would be if I ended this episode by saying that bears went extinct 11,000 years ago. Instead, we can still go to the zoo and see all kinds of bears whenever we want to.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 391: Welcome to Snake Island

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Follow the enamel pin Kickstarter here!

Let’s learn about some snakes this week! Thanks to Eilee, BlueTheChickenWing, and Richard from NC for their suggestions.

Further Reading:

Snake Island’s Venomous Vipers Find a New Home in Sao Paulo

‘Rarest Snake’ in the U.S. Hatches at Tennessee Zoo

The golden lancehead [picture from first article linked above]:

The Martinique lancehead/fer-de-lance:

The Louisiana pine snake, and a pine cone:

Show Transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

After today, the next four weeks will be all about invertebrates, or animals without a backbone, because it’s almost Invertebrate August! But this week let’s learn about some animals that are basically nothing but backbones, snakes! Thanks to Eilee, BlueTheChickenWing, and Richard from NC for their suggestions!

Also, if you like enamel pins even slightly as much as I do, I’m starting a Kickstarter in a few weeks to make some more. These will be bigger than the ones I made a few years ago and will include an aye-aye. Where else are you going to get an aye-aye enamel pin? There’s a link in the show notes if you want to sign up for an email reminder when the campaign goes live in mid-August. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kateshaw/familiar-friends-enamel-pins

Anyway, let’s start with Snake Island, suggested by Eilee. Snake Island is off the coast of Brazil in South America, and it’s quite small, only about 106 acres total, or 43 hectares. It’s hilly and a little over half of it is covered with a temperate rainforest, while the rest is grassy or just bare rocks. No one lives there these days and it’s a protected area that only scientists are allowed to visit, with the exception of members of the Brazilian navy who occasionally stop by to maintain the lighthouse that keeps ships from smashing into the rocky coast. Lots of birds live on the island or visit there, but other than that it’s mostly just snakes.

Specifically, the critically endangered golden lancehead pit viper lives on Snake Island and nowhere else in the world. It can grow nearly four feet long, or 118 cm, and is pale gold or golden-brown in color with darker splotches. It’s also incredibly venomous—but no one has ever been bitten by one as far as we know. If somehow you were bitten by one, it probably wouldn’t be a pleasant situation but you also probably wouldn’t die. That’s mainly because the golden lancehead’s venom is adapted to kill birds and reptiles, not mammals. And that’s because there are no mammals living on Snake Island.

The golden lancehead spends most of its time in trees or bushes, hunting for birds. It mainly eats two particular species of small bird that live on the island, although it will also eat other birds, lizards, and invertebrates like insects. Some reports say it will even eat smaller golden lanceheads. There’s another snake that lives on the island, Sauvage’s snail-eater, and the golden lancehead might occasionally snack on one of those. The snail-eater is also present on mainland Brazil and isn’t venomous. You can probably guess that it mainly eats snails. It’s small and thin, lives in trees, and is brownish-yellow with darker stripes and splotches.

The issue with Snake Island and its snakes is that there isn’t that much land available for the snakes to live on, and the forest has been damaged by human activity. Big chunks of forest were cleared by fire when people decided to try growing bananas on the island, which didn’t work very well. No one lives there now, but poachers do occasionally visit the island to catch snakes for the illegal wildlife trade. The golden lancehead is starting to show signs of inbreeding and disease as a result. As if that wasn’t bad enough, because the island is so close to the coast of Brazil, and mainland Brazil has its own problems with deforestation, fewer birds are migrating through the area every year. That means fewer birds stop at Snake Island and the snakes have less to eat.

Some reports claim that the island is so overrun by snakes that you’d encounter one with every step if you visited, but that’s not actually true. The snakes don’t live everywhere, and they spend almost all their time in trees. Recent studies estimate that around 2,000 to 4,000 snakes live on the island, which sounds like a lot until you remember that these are the only golden lanceheads in the whole world! Fortunately, rumors that anyone who sets foot on the island is at risk of being bitten and dying horribly from the golden lancehead’s venom keep a lot of people away. A captive breeding program in São Paulo, Brazil is also working to help the snakes.

The golden lancehead is a type of pit viper, closely related to other pit vipers found in Brazil. Its ancestors were trapped on the island when ocean levels rose at the end of the Pleistocene, around 11,000 years ago, and it’s been evolving separately ever since. Species in the genus Bothrops are also called fer-de-lance snakes, and that brings us to our next suggestion from BlueTheChickenWing.

BlueThe ChickenWing left us a nice review a while back and made two suggestions, one of which is the fer-de-lance. Fer-de-lance is a French term meaning spearhead, or lancehead, as in golden lancehead. The golden lancehead belongs to the genus Bothrops, pit vipers that are found throughout much of Central and South America as well as some Caribbean islands. We’re only going to talk about one other species of fer-de-lance this week, though, Bothrops lanceolatus, also called the Martinique lancehead. It too lives on an island, in this case the Caribbean island of Martinique.

The Martinique lancehead can grow up to 5 feet long, or 1.5 meters, with unverified reports of individuals twice that length. It’s light brown with darker speckles and a paler belly. It lives in forested areas and spends most of its time hidden, waiting for an animal to happen by. Then it strikes! It eats pretty much anything it can catch, including frogs and rats, bats and birds, rabbits, lizards, other snakes, and even large insects. Its venom isn’t as potent as the golden lancehead’s but it’s still dangerous to humans, and unlike the golden lancehead, it can and does occasionally bite people.

The Martinique lancehead is endangered due to habitat loss and poaching. People are naturally afraid of the snake and will kill it when they can, when all it wants is to be left alone to eat animals like rats and other snakes that people don’t want around either. Hospitals in Martinique keep antivenin in stock to treat the 20 or 30 people who are bitten by a fer-de-lance every year. Most people are fine after receiving treatment, but those who can’t get to the hospital in time or who try to treat the bite at home sometimes die.

The Martinique lancehead gives birth to live young, as is the case for other fer-de-lance snakes. The eggs remain inside the mother until the babies hatch, at which point the mother delivers them and they slither away to live on their own.

Speaking of snakes having babies, let’s finish with a suggestion by Richard from NC, who sent me an article that was only published literally two days ago as this episode goes live. This is not about a snake that lives on an island, but it’s so interesting I wanted to include it. It’s about the Louisiana pine snake, which is not venomous, but which is one of the rarest snakes in North America.

The pine snake is a type of constrictor, and like other constrictors it can grow quite large. The largest individual ever reliably measured was over 5 and a half feet long, or 1.8 meters. It’s tan or yellowish in color with a darker brown pattern.

It lives in open pine forests and grasslands in parts of western Louisiana and east Texas, but even when it wasn’t so rare, hardly anyone ever saw one because it spends most of its time underground. It’s specialized to eat a little rodent called Baird’s pocket gopher, and when it’s not actually hunting the gopher, it hangs out in the gopher’s old burrows to stay cool and safe. In winter it hibernates in a gopher burrow, and there’s nothing the gopher can do about that.

Baird’s pocket gopher looks a little bit like a small guinea pig because of its large head, tiny ears and eyes, chunky body, and short legs. It has long claws that help it dig rapidly in the sandy ground it prefers. While the Louisiana pine snake mostly eats the gophers, it will also eat other small animals like frogs, rabbits, and bird eggs when it finds them. The snake is threatened by habitat loss, especially the problem of roads being built through its habitat. A lot of snakes are killed by cars while trying to cross the road. Since the snake usually only lays a few eggs a year, rarely more than five, it’s hard for populations to grow.

Fortunately, the Memphis Zoo in Tennessee is headquarters for a careful captive breeding program of the pine snake. And a few days ago, a baby snake hatched and is doing great! Hopefully more will hatch soon. The babies will be cared for until they’re big enough to be safe from most predators, and then they’ll be released into the wild. So far around 300 captive-born snakes have been released into the wild, increasing the Louisiana pine snake’s chance for long-term survival.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 390: The Wallaby and Wiwaxia

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Thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

Rock-wallaby bite size ‘packs a punch’

Tiny Australian wallaby the last living link to extinct giant kangaroos

Extraordinary Fossil of Giant Short-Faced Kangaroo Found in Australia

Wiwaxia corrugata – The Burgess Shale

The nabarlek:

The banded hare-wallaby:

Wiwaxia was a little less cute than wallabies are:

An artist’s rendition of what Wiwaxia might have looked like when alive [picture from last page linked above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Every so often I get an animal suggestion that I’m positive we’ve already covered, but then I’m flabbergasted when it turns out we haven’t. That’s the case for the animals we’ll learn about this episode, with thanks to Jaxon and Lorenzo!

A while ago, Jaxon left us a nice review and suggested we talk about wallabies. I was CONVINCED we’d talked about the wallaby repeatedly, but I think I was thinking about the wombat. We’ve hardly ever mentioned the wallaby, and it’s such a great animal!

The wallaby is a marsupial that basically looks like a miniature kangaroo, although some species grow pretty large. The resemblance makes sense because kangaroos and wallabies are closely related, but everything else about the wallaby family tree is confusing. That’s because there are a lot of animals called wallabies that aren’t actually the same type of animal. “Wallaby” is just a catchall term used by people to describe any animal that looks kind of like a miniature kangaroo.

Wallabies are native to Australia and New Guinea, but various species have been introduced to other places where they’re invasive, including New Zealand, France, England, Scotland, and Hawaii. Most of these non-native populations happened by accident when pets or zoo animals escaped into the wild, but some were introduced on purpose by people who didn’t know they were causing damage to the local ecosystems.

One thing everyone knows about kangaroos, which is also true for wallabies, is that they hop instead of running. Their hind legs are extremely strong with big feet, and in fact the name of the family they share, Macropodidae, means big feet. So, you know, Bigfoot exists but maybe doesn’t look like most people think. The animal hops by leaning forward and jumping, with its big hind feet leaving the ground at about the same time, and landing at the same time too before it bounces again. Its big tail helps it balance. But there’s a lot more to this hopping than you might think.

While the wallaby or kangaroo has strong leg muscles, what’s even more important is that it has very strong, very elastic tendons in its legs. These basically act like massively strong rubber bands. When you stretch a rubber band, it stores energy that it releases when you let go of it and it snaps back and whips you in the thumb and you wonder why you did that because it hurt. The tendons in the wallaby’s legs store energy when it hops, and when it lands, the energy releases and helps bounce the animal right back into the next hop. Once it gets going, its muscles are only doing a fraction of the work to keep it hopping at high speed. Even better for the animal, a lot of its breathing is regulated by its movements when it’s hopping, so it always has plenty of oxygen to power its body while moving fast. When it lands after a bounce, the impact pushes its breath out of its lungs, but the action of bringing its legs forward helps suck fresh air in. It’s an incredibly efficient way to move, and allows the animal to travel long distances to find food and water without spending a lot of energy.

Wallabies eat plants, and naturally the bigger species can eat bigger, tougher plants than smaller species. The exception is the dwarf rock-wallaby, according to a study published in March of 2024. There are over a dozen species of rock-wallaby, but in general they live in small groups in rocky areas. They’re nocturnal and spend the day sleeping in shady areas among the rocks, under rock overhangs, or in small caves in cliffs. At night they come out to find plants, but because they live in such harsh environments, most of the plants are pretty tough. Two species of dwarf rock-wallaby in particular turn out to have incredibly strong jaws for their size, as strong as the jaws of much larger species. Their teeth are also larger to help them grind up tough plants, and one species, called the nabarlek wallaby, even grows new molars throughout its life as the old ones wear down. That’s the only marsupial known to grow new molars throughout its life.

The nabarlek is reddish-gray in color and only weighs about 3 ½ pounds at most, or 1.6 kilograms, and is barely more than a foot long, or 30 cm, with its fluffy tail almost doubling that length. When it hops, it curls its tail up over its back. It eats grass, ferns, and other tough plants. Like most species of wallaby, it’s endangered due to habitat loss and introduced predators like foxes.

Another very small wallaby is the banded hare-wallaby, which only has a few small populations remaining on a few islands. It’s almost exactly the same size and weight as the nabarlek and is gray with lighter speckles and darker stripes on its back. It’s also nocturnal and lives in brushy areas where it can hide easily.

Even though these wallabies are smaller than domestic cats, some 45,000 years ago there used to be a type of kangaroo that was extremely large. The short-faced kangaroo stood as tall as a big grey or red kangaroo, about five feet tall, or 1.5 meters, but was much bulkier—as much as twice the weight of a modern kangaroo. It was so heavy that some researchers think it couldn’t hop but actually walked on its hind legs instead like a person. (Bigfoot.)

A few years ago, scientists comparing the genetic sequence of the short-faced kangaroo to other macropods discovered that this big strong kangaroo’s closest living relative was the tiny banded hare-wallaby.

Our next animal is a suggestion from Lorenzo, who sent a bunch of requests a while back. Before we talk about the animal, I should probably explain the situation with the List. This is the list of topics that I want to cover, a lot of them suggestions from listeners and a lot of them animals I’ve added myself. It started out as a simple Word document, but after a few years I moved it over to a spreadsheet and divided it into categories. There’s a page for mammals, a page for birds, and so on. I copied and pasted Lorenzo’s suggestions into the reptiles page because I recognized the first few as reptiles, or at least therapsids.

Well, at some point I took a closer look at the list of Lorenzo’s suggestions and added a note, “these may not all be reptiles.” Then later I took an even closer look and added another note, “these down here are basal arthropods, why did you put them under reptiles?” But next to today’s animal, at some point I added the note “I think this is a bird.”

Dear listener, Wiwaxia is not a bird. Scientists aren’t actually sure what it is, but 100% it is not a bird. It lived just over half a billion years ago in the early to middle Cambrian period, which we talked about in episode 69 about the Cambrian explosion. That’s when life on earth evolved from relatively simple, tiny organisms to much larger and more complex ones. Many of the Cambrian animals look bizarre and confusing to us today because they’re so different from the animals we’re familiar with, and that’s the case for Wiwaxia.

Wiwaxia grew about 2 inches long at most, or 5 cm, and slightly less wide. It was flat underneath like a slug, and it probably moved sort of like a slug too. The upper part of its body was covered in overlapping plates called sclerites, which acted as armor. As the animal grew older, it also developed spines that grew between the sclerites in two rows, with the longest spines growing 2 inches long, or 5 cm. Modern marine invertebrates have mineralized spines and scales that make them harder, but this hadn’t evolved yet and wiwaxia’s were basically the same material as the rest of the body, but tougher. Both the scales and the spines were shed and regrown every so often.

Like all the other animals in the Cambrian, wiwaxia lived in warm, shallow ocean water. It had a feeding apparatus at its front that had tiny conical teeth, and scientists think it used this feeding apparatus to scrape bacteria off the microbial mats that lived on the sea floor in most places, or it might have lived directly on the sea floor or on rocks. Either way, its feeding apparatus is enough like the radula found in modern mollusks that it’s been tentatively placed in the phylum Mollusca. This means it may be a very distant ancestor of slugs, snails, clams, mussels, oysters, squid, octopuses, and lots of other animals.

Wiwaxia was originally classified as an ancestor or at least a relation of modern polychaete worms, and a lot of scientists still think that’s correct. Since the original description of wiwaxia in 1899, a lot of specimens have been discovered in the Burgess shale in Canada, along with lots more found in China, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Australia, with more fossils found in other places that might be wiwaxia spines.

Because all the Cambrian fossils discovered are flattened, there’s a limit to how much we know about its anatomy when alive. The best fossils are reexamined frequently as new and more powerful methods of study are invented. Wiwaxia was apparently very common throughout the world between about 520 and 505 million years ago, so as more and more fossils are discovered, we’ll definitely learn more about it.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 389: Updates 7 and the Lava Bear

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It’s our annual updates episode! Thanks to Kelsey and Torin for the extra information about ultraviolet light, and thanks to Caleb for suggesting we learn more about the dingo!

Further reading:

At Least 125 Species of Mammals Glow under Ultraviolet Light, New Study Reveals

DNA has revealed the origin of this giant ‘mystery’ gecko

Bootlace Worm: Earth’s Longest Animal Produces Powerful Toxin

Non-stop flight: 4,200 km transatlantic flight of the Painted Lady butterfly mapped

Gigantopithecus Went Extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 Years Ago, New Study Says

First-Ever Terror Bird Footprints Discovered

Last surviving woolly mammoths were inbred but not doomed to extinction

Australian Dingoes Are Early Offshoot of Modern Breed Dogs, Study Shows

A (badly) stuffed lava bear:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we have our annual updates episode, and we’ll also learn about a mystery animal called the lava bear! As usual, a reminder that I don’t try to update everything we’ve ever talked about. That would be impossible. I just pick new information that is especially interesting.

After our episode about animals and ultraviolet light, I got a great email from Kelsey and Torin with some information I didn’t know. I got permission to quote the email, which I think you’ll find really interesting too:

“You said humans can’t see UV light, which is true, however humans can detect UV light via neuropsin (a non-visual photoreceptor in the retina). These detectors allow the body to be signaled that it’s time to do things like make sex-steroid hormones, neurotransmitters, etc. (Spending too much time indoors results in non-optimal hormone levels, lowered neurotransmitter production, etc.)

“Humans also have melanopsin detectors in the retina and skin. Melanopsin detectors respond to blue light. Artificial light (LEDs, flourescents, etc) after dark entering the eye or shining on the skin is sensed by these proteins as mid-day daylight. This results in an immediate drop in melatonin production when it should be increasing getting closer to bedtime.”

And that’s why you shouldn’t look at your phone at night, which I am super bad about doing.

Our first update is related to ultraviolet light. A study published in October of 2023 examined hundreds of mammals to see if any part of their bodies glowed in ultraviolet light, called fluorescence. More than 125 of them did! It was more common in nocturnal animals that lived on land or in trees, and light-colored fur and skin was more likely to fluoresce than darker fur or skin. The white stripes of a mountain zebra, for example, fluoresce while the black stripes don’t.

The study was only carried out on animals that were already dead, many of them taxidermied. To rule out that the fluorescence had something to do with chemicals used in taxidermy, they also tested specimens that had been flash-frozen after dying, and the results were the same. The study concluded that ultraviolet fluorescence is actually really common in mammals, we just didn’t know because we can’t see it. The glow is typically faint and may appear pink, green, or blue. Some other animals that fluoresce include bats, cats, flying squirrels, wombats, koalas, Tasmanian devils, polar bears, armadillos, red foxes, and even the dwarf spinner dolphin.

In episode 20 we talked about Delcourt’s giant gecko, which is only known from a single museum specimen donated in the 19th century. In 1979 a herpetologist named Alain Delcourt, working in the Marseilles Natural History Museum in France, noticed a big taxidermied lizard in storage and wondered what it was. It wasn’t labeled and he didn’t recognize it, surprising since it was the biggest gecko he’d ever seen—two feet long, or about 60 cm. He sent photos to several reptile experts and they didn’t know what it was either. Finally the specimen was examined and in 1986 it was described as a new species.

No one knew anything about the stuffed specimen, including where it was caught. At first researchers thought it might be from New Caledonia since a lot of the museum’s other specimens were collected from the Pacific Islands. None of the specimens donated between 1833 and 1869 had any documentation, so it seemed probable the giant gecko was donated during that time and probably collected not long before. More recently there was speculation that it was actually from New Zealand, since it matched Maori lore about a big lizard called the kawekaweau.

In June of 2023, Delcourt’s gecko was finally genetically tested and determined to belong to a group of geckos from New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands east of Australia. Many of its close relations are large, although not as large as it is. It’s now been placed into its own genus.

Of course, this means that Delcourt’s gecko isn’t the identity of the kawekaweau, since it isn’t very closely related to the geckos of New Zealand, but it might mean the gecko still survives in remote parts of New Caledonia. It was probably nocturnal and lived in trees, hunting birds, lizards, and other small animals.

We talked about some really big worms in episode 289, but somehow I missed the longest worm of all. It’s called the bootlace worm and is a type of ribbon worm that lives off the coast of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain, and it’s one of the longest animals alive. The longest worm we talked about in episode 289 was an African giant earthworm, and one was measured in 1967 as 21 feet long, or 6.7 meters. The bootlace worm is only 5 to 10 mm wide, but it routinely grows between 15 and 50 feet long, or 5 to 15 meters, with one dead specimen that washed ashore in Scotland in 1864 measured as over 180 feet long, or 55 meters.

When it feels threatened, the bootlace worm releases thick mucus. The mucus smells bad to humans but it’s not toxic to us or other mammals, but a recent study revealed that it contains toxins that can kill crustaceans and even some insects.

We talked about the painted lady butterfly in episode 203, which was about insect migrations. The painted lady is a small, pretty butterfly that lives throughout much of the world, even the Arctic, but not South America for some reason. Some populations stay put year-round, but some migrate long distances. One population winters in tropical Africa and travels as far as the Arctic Circle during summer, a distance of 4,500 miles, or 7,200 km, which takes six generations. The butterflies who travel back to Africa fly at high altitude, unlike monarch butterflies that fly quite low to the ground most of the time. Unlike the monarch, painted ladies don’t always migrate every year.

In October of 2013, a researcher in a small country in South America called French Guiana found some painted lady butterflies on the beach. Gerard Talavera was visiting from Spain when he noticed the butterflies, and while he recognized them immediately, he knew they weren’t found in South America. But here they were! There were maybe a few dozen of them and he noticed that they all looked pretty raggedy, as though they’d flown a long way. He captured several to examine more closely.

A genetic study determined that the butterflies weren’t from North America but belonged to the groups found in Africa and Europe. The question was how did they get to South America? Talavera teamed up with scientists from lots of different disciplines to figure out the mystery. Their findings were only published last month, in June 2024.

The butterflies most likely rode a well-known wind current called the Saharan air layer, which blows enough dust from the Sahara to South America that it has an impact on the Amazon River basin. The trip from Africa to South America would have taken the butterflies 5 to 8 days, and they would have been able to glide most of the time, thus conserving energy. Until this study, no one realized the Saharan air layer could transport insects.

We talked about the giant great ape relation Gigantopithecus in episode 348, and only a few months later a new study found that it went extinct 100,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. The study tested the age of the cave soils where Gigantopithecus teeth have been discovered, to see how old it was, and tested the teeth again too. As we talked about in episode 348, Gigantopithecus ate fruit and other plant material, and because it was so big it would have needed a lot of it. It lived in thick forests, but as the overall climate changed around 700,000 years ago, the forest environment changed too. Other great apes living in Asia at the time were able to adapt to these changes, but Gigantopithecus couldn’t find enough food to sustain its population. It went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago according to the new study, which is actually later than I had in episode 348, where I wrote that it went extinct 350,000 years ago. Where did I get my information? I do not know.

The first footprints of a terror bird were discovered recently in Argentina, dating to 8 million years ago. We talked about terror birds in episode 202. The footprints were made by a medium-sized bird that was walking across a mudflat, and the track is beautifully preserved, which allows scientists to determine lots of new information, such as how fast the bird could run, how its toes would have helped it run or catch prey, and how heavy the bird was. We don’t know what species of terror bird made the tracks, but we know it was a terror bird.

We talked about the extinction of the mammoth in episode 256, especially the last population of mammoths to survive. They lived on Wrangel Island, a mountainous island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of western Siberia, which was cut off from the mainland about 10,000 years ago when ocean levels rose. Mammoths survived on the island until about 4,000 years ago, which is several hundred years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. It’s kind of weird to imagine ancient Egyptians building pyramids, and at the same time, mammoths were quietly living on Wrangel Island, and the Egyptians had no idea what mammoths were. And vice versa.

A 2017 genetic study stated that the last surviving mammoths were highly inbred and prone to multiple genetic issues as a result. But a study released in June of 2024 reevaluated the population’s genetic diversity and made a much different determination. The population did show inbreeding and low genetic diversity, but not to an extent that it would have affected the individuals’ health. The population was stable and healthy right to the end.

In that case, why did the last mammoths go extinct? Humans arrived on the island for the first time around 1700 BCE, but we don’t know if they encountered mammoths or, if they did, if they killed any. There’s no evidence either way. All we know is that whatever happened, it must have been widespread and cataclysmic to kill all several hundred of the mammoths on Wrangel Island.

We talked about the dingo in episode 232, about animals that are only semi-domesticated. That episode came out in 2021, and last year Caleb suggested we learn more about the dingo. I found a really interesting 2022 study that re-evaluated the dingo’s genome and made some interesting discoveries.

The dingo was probably brought to Australia by humans somewhere between 3,500 and 8,500 years ago, and after the thylacine was driven to extinction in the early 20th century, it became the continent’s apex predator. Genetic studies in the past have shown that it’s most closely related to the New Guinea singing dog, but the 2022 study compared the dingo’s genome to that of five modern dog breeds, the oldest known dog breed, the basenji, and the Greenland wolf.

The results show that the dingo is genetically in between wolves and dogs, an intermediary that shows us what the dog’s journey to domestication may have looked like. The study also discovered something else interesting. Domestic dogs have multiple copies of a gene that controls digestion, which allows them to eat a wide variety of foods. The dingo only has one copy of that gene, which means it can’t digest a lot of foods that other dogs can. Remember, the dingo has spent thousands of years adapting to eat the native animals of Australia. When white settlers arrived, they would kill dingoes because they thought their livestock was in danger from them. The study shows that the dingo has little to no interest in livestock because it would have trouble digesting, for instance, a lamb or calf. The animals most likely to be hurting livestock are domestic dogs that are allowed to run wild.

We’ll finish with a mystery animal called the lava bear. In the early 20th century, starting in 1917, a strange type of bear kept being seen in Oregon in the United States. Its fur was light brown like a grizzly bear’s, but otherwise it looked like a black bear—except for its size, which was very small. The largest was only about 18 inches tall at the back, or 46 cm, and it only weighed about 35 pounds, or 16 kg. That’s the size of an ordinary dog, not even a big dog. Ordinarily, a black bear can stand 3 feet tall at the back, or about 91 cm, and weighs around 175 pounds, or 79 kg, and a big male can be twice that weight and much taller.

The small bear was seen in desert, especially around old lava beds, which is where it gets its name. A shepherd shot one in 1917, thinking it was a bear cub, and when he retrieved the body he was surprised to find it was an adult. He had it taxidermied and photographs of it were published in the newspapers and a hunting magazine, which brought more hunters to the area.

People speculated that the animal might be an unknown species of bear, possibly related to the grizzly or black bear, and maybe even a new species of sun bear, a small bear native to Asia.

Over the next 17 years, many lava bears were killed by hunters and several were captured for exhibition. When scientists finally got a chance to examine one, they discovered that it was just a black bear. Its small size was due to malnutrition, since it lived in a harsh environment without a lot of food, and its light-colored fur was well within the range of fur color for an American black bear. Lava bears are still occasionally sited in the area around Fossil Lake.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 388: Washington’s Eagle

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Further reading:

Audubon’s Bird of Washington: Unraveling the fraud that launched The Birds of America

The Mystery of the Missing John James Audubon Self-Portrait

Washington’s eagle, as painted by Audubon:

The tiny detail in Audubon’s golden eagle painting that is supposed to be a self-portrait:

The golden eagle painting as it was published. Note that there’s no tiny figure in the lower left-hand corner:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This past weekend I was out of town, or to be completely honest I will have been out of town, because I’m getting this episode ready well in advance. Since July 4 was only a few days ago, or will have been only a few days ago, and July 4 is Independence Day in the United States of America, I thought it might be fun to talk about a very American bird, Washington’s eagle.

We talked about it before way back in episode 17, and I updated that information for the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book for its own chapter. When I was researching birds for episode 381 I revisited the topic briefly and realized it’s so interesting that I should just turn it into a full episode.

We only have two known species of eagle in North America, the bald eagle and the North American golden eagle. Both have wingspans that can reach more than 8 feet, or 2.4 meters, and both are relatively common throughout most of North America. But we might have a third eagle, or had one only a few hundred years ago. We might even have a depiction of one by the most famous bird artist in the world, James Audubon.

In February 1814, Audubon was traveling on a boat on the upper Mississippi River when he spotted a big eagle he didn’t recognize. A Canadian fur dealer who was with him said it was a rare eagle that he’d only ever seen around the Great Lakes before, called the great eagle. Audubon was familiar with bald eagles and golden eagles, but he was convinced the “great eagle” was something else.

Audubon made four more sightings over the next few years, including at close range in Kentucky where he was able to watch a pair with a nest and two babies. Two years after that he spotted an adult eagle at a farm near Henderson, Kentucky. Some pigs had just been slaughtered and the eagle was looking for scraps. Audubon shot the bird and took it to a friend who lived nearby, an experienced hunter, and both men examined the body carefully.

According to the notes Audubon made at the time, the bird was a male with a wingspan of 10.2 feet, or just over 3 meters. Since female eagles are generally larger than males, that means this 10-foot wingspan was likely on the smaller side of average for the species. It was dark brown on its upper body, a lighter cinnamon brown underneath, and had a dark bill and yellow legs.

Audubon named the bird Washington’s eagle and used the specimen as a model for a life-sized painting. Audubon was meticulous about details and size, using a double-grid method to make sure his bird paintings were exact. This was long before photography.

So we have a detailed painting and first-hand notes from James Audubon himself about an eagle that…doesn’t appear to exist.

Audubon painted a few birds that went extinct afterwards, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, along with less well-known birds like Bachman’s warbler and the Carolina parakeet. He also made some mistakes. Many people think Washington’s eagle is another mistake and was just an immature bald eagle, which it resembles.

But here’s the problem. Audubon wasn’t always truthful. He painted some birds that he never saw but claimed he did, because another bird illustrator had painted them first. Once he claimed he went hunting with Daniel Boone in Kentucky in 1810, but at that time Boone would have been in his 70s and was living several states away.

Audubon also claimed that he discovered a little bird called Lincoln’s sparrow, but this wasn’t the case. His wife’s transcript of his diary doesn’t match up with the account that Audubon published about the discovery, but magically, when his granddaughter published her version of the diary later, Audubon’s discovery of the sparrow was in it. Historians think his granddaughter changed the diary entry to match up with Audubon’s published claim, and then she burned the original diaries. Further research into Audubon’s published writings have revealed plagiarism, false data, outright lies, and even completely fake species.

Audubon was also patriotic, as evidenced by his naming the eagle after George Washington. His journals and letters are full of praise for Washington, who died in 1799, only fifteen years before Audubon first saw the “great eagle.” There’s always a chance that Audubon wanted to name a bird after his idol, but not just any bird. It had to be majestic and bold, the largest eagle in the world! Maybe he decided to invent one.

Audubon also needed money to continue his work of painting birds, and most of the money came from English nobility. His painting and notes about a gigantic eagle made a real splash, bringing him money and fame for the rest of his life. But no evidence of the eagle’s existence has been discovered in the last 200 years. All we have are one man’s notes, a painting, and some stories of other specimens here and there. What we don’t have are the specimens, not even any feathers.

While we’re talking about one Audubon eagle mystery, let’s learn about another mystery. While Audubon was an incredible painter of birds, he wasn’t all that great at painting people. Only two of his famous bird paintings contain human figures, and one of them is his painting of the golden eagle. The other is a hunter painted in the background of the snowy egret, but Audubon didn’t paint that figure himself. He painted the bird, but hired another artist to paint the background. But this isn’t the case for the golden eagle painting, and that’s where the mystery lies. Even though it’s not technically anything to do with the bird, I know we’re all here for a good mystery too, so let’s talk about this painting.

Most of the time Audubon shot the birds he painted, which isn’t a great thing to do but which was common back then for scientists and collectors to shoot even very rare animals. Few people really understood conservation at the time. In the case of the golden eagle, though, the bird was already so rare in the early 19th century that Audubon couldn’t find one to shoot. He eventually bought one from a museum in 1833—but the bird wasn’t dead. It was injured, and Audubon was so impressed by its beauty that he almost set it free. But he needed to paint the bird, and in order to do that to his own meticulous standard, the bird had to be dead so he could really examine it in detail. So, after wrestling with his conscience, he killed the bird.

He spent the next two weeks drawing, studying, and eventually painting the bird. As soon as he finished, he reportedly had a mental breakdown. Not only had he been painting almost nonstop for years at that point, he really didn’t like killing birds. Plus, in the case of the golden eagle, instead of shooting it from a distance, he had killed it up close in person—as humanely as possible, but he still ended its life, and that bothered him.

The mystery comes from a detail in the painting’s background. The golden eagle is shown in front of a dramatic background of snowy mountains, with a dead snowshoe hare in its talons. But in a tiny detail in the lower left-hand corner, a man is shown crossing a gorge on a fallen tree trunk. Strapped onto the man’s back is a dead golden eagle.

The man is awkwardly rendered, but experts believe it’s a self-portrait of Audubon himself. Some experts believe Audubon included himself with a dead eagle, navigating a perilous climb, to indicate his emotional struggle in killing the bird. But when the painting was eventually included in Audubon’s famous book of bird illustrations, the figure was gone. The gorge with the fallen tree remains, but the little man carrying the dead bird has been painted out.

The question is why. Who made that decision, Audubon himself or the publisher? If Audubon did it, was it because he was embarrassed that he’d included a self-portrait, or was he embarrassed at the poor rendering of his figure, or did he just think it detracted from the painting, or some other reason? If the publisher did it, did he dislike the badly painted little man, or did Audubon ask him to remove the figure, or some other reason? We don’t know, and very likely we’ll never know.

While Audubon reportedly loved birds, it turns out he wasn’t a great human. Besides shooting a whole lot of birds and other animals, sometimes hundreds in a single day, and lying in published scientific papers, he “owned” enslaved people and reportedly made money selling them. (Just saying that sentence makes me so mad. You cannot own people.) In 2023, members of the National Audubon Society called for the group to change its name and drop any mention of Audubon, and when the board of directors said no, a lot of members resigned.

I came into this topic really hoping Washington’s eagle was a real bird, and believing that James Audubon was an artist who loved birds and was an honest man who made some mistakes. Now I’ve discovered that Audubon was a liar and a bad person, and that Washington’s eagle was probably just the result of one of his lies. At least we still have golden eagles, bald eagles, and lots of other amazing birds to admire!

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

 

Episode 386: The Greater Siren and the Anhinga

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Thanks to Kai and Emily for their suggestions this week!

The greater siren [photo by Kevin Stohlgren, taken from this site]:

The anhinga [photo by Tim from Ithaca – Anhinga, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15526948]:

An anhinga swimming [photo by Wknight94, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about two animals, one suggested by Kai and the other suggested by Kai’s mom Emily. It’s so awesome to hear when families like to listen to the podcast together. This episode even includes a mystery animal I bet you’ve never heard of.

Let’s start with Kai’s suggestion, the greater siren. The greater siren is an amphibian, specifically a salamander, but it’s probably not the kind of salamander you’re thinking of. For one thing, it can grow over three feet long, or about a meter, which is pretty darn big for a salamander. It’s dark green or gray in color with tiny yellow or green speckles, and while it has short front legs, those are the only legs it has or needs. It also has external gills which it keeps throughout its life, unlike most salamanders who lose their external gills when they metamorphose into adults.

The greater siren lives primarily in Florida, but it’s also found in coastal wetlands throughout much of the southeastern United States. It’s mostly nocturnal and during the day it hides among water plants or under rocks, and will even burrow into the mud. At night it comes out to find food, which includes crayfish and other crustaceans, insects and spiders, little fish, other amphibians, snails, and even algae. It swallows its food whole, even snails and other mollusks. It poops out the shells and other undigestible pieces.

The grater siren’s body is long but thin, sort of like an eel, with a rounded tail that’s slightly flattened to help it swim. While it does spend its whole life in the water, it has small lungs that allow it to breathe air if it needs to. It can wriggle above ground for short distances if it needs to find a new pond or river, and sometimes it will sun itself on shore. In drought conditions when its water dries up, the greater siren will burrow into the mud and secrete mucus that mixes with dead skin cells to form a sort of cocoon. The cocoon covers everything but the siren’s mouth, so it can still breathe. Then it enters a state of torpor called aestivation, and it can stay in its mud cocoon for a long time, possibly as much as five years, and still be fine once the water returns. It does lose a lot of its body fat and its gills wither away, but it regenerates them quickly once it has water, and will gain weight quickly too once it has food.

In early spring, the female siren lays her eggs in shallow water. The male fertilizes them and takes care of them for the next two months, when they hatch into little bitty sirens that go off on their own right away.

The greater siren has tiny eyes and probably doesn’t see very well. It has a good sense of smell instead, and it can also sense movement and vibrations around it with its lateral line system. This is an organ found in many fish and a lot of larval amphibians, although the greater siren retains it throughout its life. It allows the animal to sense the movement of water in extremely fine detail. The greater siren can probably also sense electrical impulses, which is something that all animals generate when they use their muscles.

If there’s a greater siren, you may be thinking, there must be a lesser siren too. There is, and it’s very similar to the greater siren, just not as big. It only grows about two feet long at most, or 61 cm.

Kai mentioned that the greater siren looks a lot like the axolotl, a critically endangered salamander found only in Mexico. I checked to see if the two salamanders were closely related and was actually surprised to find that they’re not. They’re both salamanders and therefore share the same order, but that’s all. The greater siren and its close relations do share one important trait with the axolotl, though, which is neotony. Neotony is when an adult organism retains juvenile traits, which in the case of the salamander means it retains gills and lives underwater as an adult.

Next, Emily wanted to learn more about a bird called the anhinga. It’s sometimes called the snakebird because it has a long, serpentine neck. But before we learn about the anhinga, let’s learn about a mystery animal from Kentucky. I promise this will make sense in a minute.

In 1993 a man named Barton Nunnelly and his wife were sitting in their back yard in Stanley County, Kentucky. It was a nice day and their house was close to the Ohio River, so as they often did they just relaxed and watched the river. On this particular day, they both noticed a strange animal in the water. It was snake-like with a bill similar to a duck’s, but it obviously wasn’t a duck. It swam with its head and neck above the water, but its body was never visible. It frequently sank into the water, then surfaced elsewhere. The couple watched the animal for half an hour before it disappeared downstream.

For most people, that sighting would just be an interesting story to tell at parties, but Barton Nunnelly was a cryptozoologist. That’s someone who likes to investigate mystery animals, and while it’s a great word, it’s not an official branch of science. Zoologists, biologists, and other scientists study mystery animals all the time as part of their jobs. Nunnelly investigated—and in fact still does investigate, since he’s alive and well—mystery animals that are a lot more mystery than animal, like Bigfoot. He wrote about his sighting of what he thought might be a young freshwater sea serpent in his book Mysterious Kentucky.

Now, with Nunnelly’s sighting in mind, let’s return to the anhinga and learn a little more about this unusual bird. It can grow almost three feet in length, or about 90 cm, with a nearly four-foot wingspan, or 115 cm. A lot of its body length is due to the long neck. The male is black all over with a white tail-tip, while the female looks similar but has a brown head and neck. It looks similar to the double-crested cormorant, a close relation, but it has a longer, sharper bill. It lives throughout much of South and Central America, and is also common around the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the southeastern United States. In North America it usually stays near the coast or around wetlands, but sometimes it’s found farther inland, especially along rivers.

The most interesting feature of the anhinga is the way it hunts. It has big webbed feet and swims extremely well, and it hunts fish, frogs, and other small animals underwater. Unlike other water birds, which have water-repellent oils coating their feathers, as soon as the anhinga gets in the water, its feathers get all wet. This causes it to lose buoyancy and sink, but that’s just fine with the anhinga. It also has dense bones compared to most birds, which helps it stay underwater. The bird swims underwater until it gets close to a fish or other prey animal. Then it stabs the animal with its sharp bill, before bringing it above water to swallow. Often it will swim with its body completely submerged but its head and neck sticking up out of the water.

One interesting fact about the anhinga is that it has no nostrils. It can only breathe through its mouth. It can hold its breath underwater for about four minutes and during that time can travel quite a distance, up to about 100 yards, or 90 meters, completely underwater. In addition to fish and frogs, it will eat crayfish, crabs, insects, water snakes, and lots of other small animals. After it’s done hunting, or if it wants a rest, it will stand in the sun with its wings spread in order to dry its feathers. Cormorants do this too for the same reason.

Now, think back to Barton Nunnelly’s sighting of a duck-billed water serpent. It sounds to me an awful lot like Nunnelly saw an anhinga hunting in the river. It’s a rare visitor that far inland, but not unheard of. Naturally, not everyone knows every single bird in the world, but I feel like if you’re going to write a book about mystery animals, you should do a little research first. But maybe that’s just me.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 382: Smilodon, the Sabertoothed Cat

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Thanks to Luke for suggesting this week’s topic: Smilodon, the saber-toothed cat, AKA the sabertooth tiger!

Further reading:

Did sabertooth tigers purr or roar?

The double-fanged adolescence of saber-toothed cats

We don’t know for sure what Smilodon looked like, but it might have been something like this:

An artist’s rendition of an adolescent Smilodon with doubled fangs [picture from second link above]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about an animal suggested by Luke, the sabertooth tiger, also called the sabertooth cat since it wasn’t actually a tiger, also called smilodon after its scientific name. We’ve talked about it before, way back in episode 34, but a lot of new studies have been published since then and we know a lot more about this terrifying-looking animal!

The genus of the saber-toothed cat is Smilodon, so that’s mostly what I’m going to call it in this episode. It’s classified as a member of the family Felidae, which is the same family where you find domestic cats, wildcats, big cats, and lots of extinct animals like the cave lion, but Smilodon wasn’t closely related to what we think of as cats. There were at least three species of saber-tooth cats in the genus Smilodon that we know of, but it had many other similar-looking relatives.

Smilodon is best known from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California, where the remains of hundreds of individuals have been discovered. That’s a big reason why we know so much about Smilodon, especially the species Smilodon fatalis that lived in North America and parts of South America. An even bigger species lived exclusively in South America, while both were probably descended from a smaller species that also lived in South America.

S. fatalis is estimated to have grown up to 39 inches tall at the shoulder, or 99 cm, while S. populator stood at an estimated 47 inches tall, or 119 cm. That’s almost four feet tall. Some full-grown humans are that height! Smilodon was so stocky and heavily muscled that it probably looked more like a bear than a cat. Its had a broad head and jaws that could open much wider than most modern animals, which allowed it to deploy its most deadly weapon, its saber teeth, without its jaw getting in the way.

Smilodon’s saber teeth were as much as 11 inches long, or 28 cm, although S. fatalis typically had teeth around 8 inches long, or 20 cm. Big as they were, the saber teeth were also relatively delicate. A young Smilodon didn’t start growing its big teeth until it was about a year old, and even then it had to learn how to use them so they wouldn’t break. Luckily for adolescent smilodons, they didn’t lose their baby fangs until they were fully grown.

Most mammals only grow two sets of teeth in our lifetimes. The first set is usually called baby teeth or milk teeth. As the baby grows up, its adult teeth start growing in one at a time. The adult tooth pushes at the baby tooth until it gets loose and either comes out on its own or, in the case of me in second grade, I asked to go to the bathroom and then spent half an hour twisting at a loose baby tooth until it finally came out, along with some blood. But I got a quarter that night from the tooth fairy. (Kids, maybe don’t do that.)

In the case of a young smilodon’s saber teeth, they grew in just next to the baby fangs. Instead of pushing the baby fangs out, the new teeth grew alongside them and even had a groove for the baby teeth to fit into. When scientists first discovered preserved jaws with these double fangs, they thought it was a fluke, that sometimes the new teeth came in wrong and didn’t push the old teeth out. That happens in humans sometimes too and then you have to go to the dentist to get the old baby teeth taken out. But paleontologists kept finding these double toothed jaws, and only in adolescent smilodons.

Finally a team of scientists studied the teeth carefully and made a surprising discovery. The baby fang stayed in place next to the saber tooth until the animal was about two and a half years old, at which time the baby fang finally fell out. In early 2024 the team published their study, which concluded that these double teeth acted sort of like a set of training wheels. Training wheels on a bicycle keep a new rider from tipping over sideways, and the doubled fangs kept the saber teeth from getting bent sideways until they broke. By the time the baby fang fell out, the smilodon had lots of experience hunting properly and no longer needed training wheels.

Smilodon legs are relatively short, which suggests it didn’t do a lot of running after prey. It was probably an ambush hunter and may have hunted in groups, sort of like lions do today. Some scientists think that instead of big groups, smilodon lived in small family groups of a mated pair and their offspring, which they took care of for several years. There’s even some evidence that adult animals with debilitating injuries or congenital issues that meant they couldn’t hunt were taken care of by other adults.

Smilodon ate large animals like ground sloths, horses, deer, camelids, and glyptodonts. It went extinct about 11,000 years ago, the same time that a lot of its prey went extinct too. We don’t know what color it was, but modern cats that hunt in forested areas generally have spots while cats that hunt in open areas generally have plain coats. Since smilodon lived in a variety of habitats, from forests to deserts, its coat pattern and coloration may have varied from region to region. It also had a short tail like a bobcat instead of a long tail like most modern cats.

Let’s finish with one last important detail about smilodon. Did it purr or did it roar? Remember that modern cats can either do one or the other, not both. A tiger can’t purr, while a wildcat can’t roar. In modern cats, the difference appears to be due to the number of hyoid bones in the throat. Humans have a single hyoid bone, which anchors the larynx in place, but cats have a whole row of them. Cats that can roar have seven of these tiny bones, while cats that can purr have nine of them.

Smilodon had seven hyoid bones. Therefore, scientists assumed, smilodon could roar but not purr. But a study from 2023 suggests it’s not that simple. The hyoid bones in purring cats are shaped differently from those in roaring cats. Smilodon only had seven hyoid bones, but some of them were shaped like really big purring hyoid bones, big even for the animal’s large size. Scientists aren’t sure if that means smilodon was able to purr in a deep register, if it could roar instead but with a really deep voice compared to modern cats, or if it made some other sound that we can’t even guess at.

In other words, I’m sorry, we don’t know if smilodon roared or purred, and we probably won’t know for sure until someone invents a time machine. Personally, I like to think that smilodon could purr and roar, and that it could also meow, but in a really deep voice. MEOW.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 381: Out of Place Birds

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Thanks to Richard from NC, Pranav, and Alexandra for their suggestions this week!

Further reading:

ABA Rare Bird Alert

One Reason Migrating Birds Get Lost Is Out of This World

Inside the Amazing Cross-Continent Saga of the Steller’s Sea-Eagle

A Vagrant European Robin Is Drawing Huge Crowds in China

Bird migration: When vagrants become pioneers

A red-cockaded woodpecker:

Steller’s Sea Eagle making a couple of bald eagles look small:

Steller’s sea eagle:

A whole lot of birders showed up to see a European robin that showed up in the Beijing Zoo [photo from the fourth article linked above]:

A robin:

Mandarin ducks:

Richard’s pipit [photo by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23214345]:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

We’re talking about some birds again this week, with a slightly mysterious twist. These are birds that have shown up in places where they shouldn’t be, sometimes way way far from home! Thanks to Richard from NC for inspiring this episode and suggesting one of the birds we’re going to talk about, and thanks to Pranav for suggesting we cover more out of place animals.

Last week we talked about some woodpeckers, and I said I thought there was another listener who had suggested the topic. Well, that was Alexandra! Let’s start today’s episode talking about the red-cockaded woodpecker, another bird Alexandra suggested.

The red-cockaded woodpecker is native to the coastal southeastern United States, where it lives in pine forests. It’s increasingly threatened by habitat loss since the pine forests get smaller every year, and not only does it need old-growth pine forests to survive, it also needs some of the trees to be affected by red heart fungus. The fungus softens the interior wood, which is otherwise very hard, and allows a woodpecker to excavate nesting holes in various trees that can be quite large. The female lays her eggs in the best nesting hole and she and her mate raise the babies together, helped by any of their children from previous nests who don’t have a mate of their own yet. When they don’t have babies, during the day the birds forage together, but at night they each hide in their own little nesting hole to sleep.

It’s a small bird that doesn’t migrate, which is why Beth Miller, a birder in Muskegon, Michigan, couldn’t identify it when she spotted it on July 1, 2022 in some pine trees near a golf course. She took lots of photos and a recording of its calls, which she posted in a birding group to ask for help. She knew the bird had to be a rare visitor of some kind, but when it was identified as a red-cockaded woodpecker, she and nine birder friends went back to the golf course to look for it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the bird again. It was the first time a red-cockaded woodpecker had ever been identified in Michigan, although individual birds do sometimes wander widely.

While bird migration isn’t fully understood, many birds use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way to new territories and back again later in the year. Humans can’t sense magnetic fields but birds can, and being able to sense Earth’s magnetic field helps birds navigate even at night or during weather that keeps them from being able to see landmarks.

But sometimes birds get lost, especially young birds who have never migrated before or a bird that gets caught in storm winds that blow it far off course. If a bird shows up somewhere far outside of its normal range, birdwatchers refer to it as a vagrant, and some birders will travel great distances to see vagrant birds.

One interesting note is that birds navigating by the earth’s magnetic field can get confused if the magnetic field is disrupted by geomagnetic storms, including solar flares, sunspots, and coronal mass ejections. Very recently as this episode goes live, the aurora has been occasionally visible across much of the world. The aurora is caused by charged particles from the sun reaching Earth’s atmosphere, causing a colorful glow or shimmer in the night sky, and it’s usually only visible at or near the poles. This month it was visible in places far away from the poles. Fortunately, a really strong geomagnetic storm like the ones this month can actually make it easier for birds to migrate. Instead of getting a scrambled sense of the earth’s magnetic field, a strong geomagnetic storm can temporarily knock out a bird’s ability to sense the magnetic field at all, and that means it uses landmarks, the position of the stars and sun, and other methods to find its way.

Sometimes a bird just flies the wrong way, like the Steller’s sea eagle that showed up in Alaska at the end of August 2020. Steller’s sea eagle is native to the coast of northeastern Asia and is increasingly threatened due to habitat loss, pollution, climate change, poaching, and overfishing, a real problem if you’re an eagle that eats a whole lot of fish. Only about 4,000 of the birds remain in the wild. It’s a huge eagle, one of the biggest in the world, with a big female having a wingspan over 8 feet across, or almost 2.5 meters. Some unverified reports indicate birds with a wingspan over 9 feet across, or 2.8 meters. It has a huge yellow bill and feet, and is black and white in color. It’s related to the bald eagle but is larger and heavier, and its head is black instead of white.

To an eagle as big as Steller’s sea eagle, the distance between the eastern coast of Russia and the western coast of Alaska is very small, so it’s not all that unusual for birders to see one in Alaska. The difference in 2020 is that the bird was far inland, not on the coast. Then, several months later, a Steller’s sea eagle was reported in Texas. Texas! Very far away from Alaska and the northeastern Asian coast.

No one could definitively say if the Texas bird was the same one seen in Alaska, but a few weeks before there had been a massive storm that could have blown the eagle to San Antonio. It was the first time a wild Steller’s sea eagle had been spotted in Texas.

But the bird wasn’t done traveling. In late June 2021, a ranger in eastern Canada spotted the sea eagle. It was seen by multiple birders and photographers, some of whom got pictures good enough to compare to the Alaska photos from the year before, and it was the same bird! A few months later it was spotted in Nova Scotia, Canada, and in mid-December 2021 it arrived in southern Massachusetts in the United States for a few days. By the end of 2021 it was in Maine.

Since then the eagle appears to divide its time between Maine in the northeastern United States and Newfoundland, Canada, not too far away.

Richard from NC suggested that sightings of Steller’s sea eagle might explain the mystery of Washington’s eagle. I go into detail about Washington’s eagle in the Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie book. There is a rare color morph of Steller’s sea eagle that is almost all black, which matches Audubon’s painting of Washington’s eagle, but Steller’s sea eagle always has a yellow bill, not a dark one as Audubon painted. Still, it’s a very interesting theory that matches a lot better than the theory that Washington’s eagle is just a big juvenile bald eagle.

Eagles are spectacular birds, but even an ordinary bird turns into a celebrity when it shows up somewhere far outside of its normal range. That’s what happened to a European robin at the beginning of 2019. We talked about the European robin back in episode 333. It’s a common bird throughout much of Europe and parts of Asia, but it’s only been documented in Beijing, China three times. The third time was when one showed up in the Beijing Zoo in 2019, at least 1,500 miles, or 2,400 km, away from its usual range. Birdwatching is an increasingly popular hobby in China, and hundreds of birders showed up at the zoo not to see the animals it has on display but to see a little robin that someone in England would barely glance at.

A few months before that, on the other side of the planet, a Mandarin duck showed up in Central Park in New York City. Birders showed up soon after to look at it. The Mandarin duck is a beautiful bird related to the wood duck native to North America, but it’s native to China and other parts of east Asia. The male has a red bill, rusty red face with white markings, and purplish feathers on his sides, while the female is softer and more muted in color. Both males and females have a purplish crest and the male also has a reddish crest on both of his wings that sticks up like a sail when his wings are folded.

In other words, the male in particular is a spectacular duck, and the duck that showed up at Central Park was a male in full breeding plumage, looking his best. Since Mandarin ducks are so attractive and increasingly threatened in the wild, many zoos and private owners keep them, and the Central Park duck did have a band on his leg that indicates he might have been an escaped bird. But no one ever claimed him and in March of 2019 he flew off for good.

Vagrant birds show up in weird places all the time, especially in spring and fall when most migratory birds are on the move. Sometimes a vagrant bird returns to the mistaken area in following years, brings its mate and offspring, and essentially founds a new migratory route. This is what scientists think has happened with several species of songbird that breed in Siberia and migrate to southeast Asia for the winter.

Richard’s pipit is a medium-sized songbird with long legs, a long tail, and a relatively long bill. It’s mainly brown and black, with lighter underparts. It looks like a stretched-out sparrow. It migrates to southern Siberia, Mongolia, and a few other parts of central Asia to nest during the summer, and flies back to India and other parts of southeast Asia to spend the winter. But a small population flies west instead of south and spends the winter in Spain, Italy, and surrounding areas instead of in India.

For a long time scientists thought the birds seen in Europe were just lost. They’re still quite rare in Europe compared to their high population in Asia. Then a team of scientists caught 81 of the birds, installed leg-bands on all of them and GPS loggers on seven of them, and released them again. The birds migrated north to breed, then returned to Europe instead of Asia to spend the winter, where some were caught again and their leg-bands recorded. So just remember that when a bird shows up where it’s not expected, it might not be as lost as people think.

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